Chasing Amy

Amy Adams proves she is more than just another Disney princess

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If there is anyone who could gather bluebirds and chipmunks to her side by simply trilling a few bars, it would be Amy Adams. Swanning into a chic West Village bistro one December night, she is everything you'd expect from a newly crowned Hollywood princess: her makeup-free skin as flawless as a china doll's, her profile so delicately perfect, you can see the entire room lose its train of thought as she turns her head this way and that, looking for her table. And of course no movie star cliché would be complete without saying this: She is much smaller in real life. Stripped of her enormous gown from Enchanted, the Disney blockbuster for which she earned a Golden Globe nomination, and her huge baby bump from Junebug, for which she netted a 2005 Oscar nomination, the 5'4" Adams appears tiny, waifish, fragile. She's wrapped in layers of Prada and creamy cashmere and wears a gray hat that manages to both discreetly cover her signature mane of strawberry-blond hair and highlight the giant square diamond studs glinting on her earlobes.

Yes, after nine years on the audition circuit in Los Angeles and more acclaimed performances than most of the ingenues plastered across tabloids, Adams, 33, is, at long last, with the aid of a little Disney stardust, drawing admiring crowds —Enchanted was the second-highest Thanksgiving weekend box office debut ever. And now, with Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day opposite Frances McDormand hitting theaters this month, the forthcoming indie Sunshine Cleaning with Emily Blunt, and not one but two Meryl Streep films in the works, her Cinderella moment has arrived.

However, it quickly becomes evident that the transformation is not quite complete: For one, the maicirc;tre d' isn't feeling the Adams magic and, though the restaurant is nearly empty, refuses to let us move to a quiet corner table— "I'm sorry, it's reserved for a celebration," he says, not seeming sorry at allmdash; and seats next to us a garrulous party of drunken middle-aged tourists dressed in sequins and leisure suits straight out of Dynasty. And then there are the earrings: "They're fake. Aren't they great? They're the Diamonique series from QVC. I got them in a gift bag," she confesses. "It's so not me to have these big rocks. If I were to buy a diamond, it would be more like this size," she says, pointing to a modest solitaire on her finger. The hat is not to fend off recognition, but to hide the fact that she's still wearing part of a wimple and a thicket of industrial hairspray, having just left the set of Doubt, the film based on John Patrick Shanley's Pulitzer prize-winning play, in which she portrays a nun opposite Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman. The cashmere sweater was a gift from her manager. The trendy boots, a girlfriend persuaded her to buy this fall on "my very first real shopping spree." Until very recently, Adams says, she bought mostly secondhand clothes—not vintage Givenchy, she makes clear, and not some sort-of hipster eco-chic recycled garb, just plain old used clothes. "It was my big thing. It speaks to why my wardrobe was so bad. I've finally stopped," she says with some relief, as though she's talking about nail-biting or smoking.

She worked steadily in TV and B movies for several years before Steven Spielberg gave her her first big break as Brenda, Leonardo DiCaprio's fiancée in Catch Me if You Can. "Amy got tons of attention for [the role], and she deserved every bit of it," Spielberg says. "What surprised me was how little she worked after our film came out, which, by the way, was a big hit. But the offers were not pouring in for Amy. That was the part that should have launched her career," Spielberg continues. "But after the movie was released, she was no better off than she was before."

In fact, she didn't work at all for a year and even considered giving up the movie business to try Broadway. "I think you can spend a lot of time speculating on what it was" that caused the drought, Adams says, "but ultimately, it just wasn't my time. I wasn't ready. I still had a lot to learn and a lot of self-growth to work through."

It took her Oscar-nominated role as Ashley, the devoutly Christian, pregnant motormouth in Junebug, to truly put her on the map. She's sanguine about losing the Oscar to Rachel Weisz. "I was so relieved," she says. "I really was. I thought she was going to win. She deserved to win. There was only one moment briefly, I think it was when Dolly Parton was singing, that I had a panic attack thinking, What if I win? It's not that it would have been a bad thing. It's just, I wasn't prepared, at that moment in my life, to win an Oscar."

With the work she's been turning out, however, Adams had better gird herself for more nominations and, more likely than not, some wins. "When you get a script as an actor, everyone sees the movie in their head as they're reading," says Enchanted costar James Marsden. "Of course, there are different interpretations, and we all see different movies. Amy always sees the best movie, the best way to play the character. Whether it's Disney or Spielberg, she always finds the most interesting path and the most intelligent path for her characters."

With Giselle, the cartoon princess come to life from Enchanted, for example, she could have played it broader, campier, for the easy laughs, and director Kevin Lima has said that many actresses who auditioned did. "People say, `Why did you make her so earnest?'" Adams says. "And I'm like, Because you play her for truth. You play her like you're doing Shakespeare. Everything she says is important to her. I always play comedy like drama. I don't feel like I'm doing two different things. I just think that you commit."

Her dedication to her work comes up over and over again among colleagues. "What defines Amy is her absolute commitment to the character and the job," Marsden says. "She wanted to give it absolutely everything she had, do whatever was necessary to prepare for it. She was there at every dance rehearsal, every singing lesson. It felt like we were preparing ourselves for live performance, and she welcomed the challenge."

Frances McDormand sees Adams' perfectionism and control— "She knows exactly what she's doing on all fronts"—as a side effect of her "background in the cutthroat world of Midwestern dinner theater. I don't think a young actor could have better training, and that includes some of our higher halls of learning," she says. "The work ethic and competition are great preparation for the world she's in now."

Adams is known among her actress friends for occasionally showing up at auditions in full costume. Selma Blair caught her once at an audition in full hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold regalia. "I was in fishnet pantyhose and jean shorts and some Baby Phat sweatshirt that I got at the secondhand store," Adams remembers. "And Selma Blair shows up in, like, a Ralph Lauren velvet blazer and skinny jeans, and she was like..." Adams pauses, mimicking Blair's horror-stricken gaze: " `You dressed up?' " For her audition for Catch Me if You Can she wore teeth-whitening trays so she could capture Brenda's brace-faced lisp.

Her boyfriend, actor and artist Darren Le Gallo, whom she met in acting class, initially thought she was "that scary girl, like Tracy Flick in Election," she says. "I was always like, `Oooh, I know the answer!' Because when I was in class I was really focused: I'm here to learn, I'm here to work."
However, to think of Adams as an overachieving priss is an error (as Le Gallo soon realized—the two have been together now for five years, share a bungalow cottage in L.A., and sport matching rings displaying a sort-of-private love code, "NU42," which means, says Adams, "all encompassing love" and which Le Gallo also has tattooed on his wrist).

"I would never describe her as a goody-goody," says Sarah Lancaster, costar of NBC's Chuck and one of Adams' closest friends (she's the one who persuaded Adams to give up the secondhand duds and splurge on those boots). "There's a lack of work ethic in Hollywood right now, so Amy just stands out because she's really diligent, stays on top of herself, shows up on time, and is always where she's supposed to be. But she's far from a goody-goody. She's a throwback. She's a dame. She can drink with the boys, but she's also very proper and elegant. She's a classy broad."

Indeed, no matter how much success comes Adams' way, it's hard to imagine her getting embroiled in the drug scandals and crotch-shot wardrobe malfunctions that have tangled up other It Girls. "I have a very extensive underwear wardrobe, so I'm covered," Adams jokes. "They make really great underwear now. Like Commandos, you can't see a line. They're fantastic. Personal preference, I guess. I can't imagine anything more horrifying than having that picture published." If she were going to get called out by Us Weekly, she says, it would be for something like "yelling at the maître d' for not giving us the corner table" and then hoots with laughter when she looks over at the "celebration" that cost us our table—three middle-aged men in suits not talking to each other and dourly staring off into space. Lancaster agrees with Adams' self-appraisal: "She's ornery! She's a firecracker!"

The benefit of gradually earning your place at the top, rather than being ginned up as the girl of the moment as soon as you hit Sunset Boulevard, is that Adams has been able to grow up—as an actor and a person—so that she is now truly ready for her close-up. "My scandal is all in my past, which is really fortunate," she says. "I don't have the energy to maintain any scandals now. I think when you're younger you can sort of keep all those balls in the air, but I'm more settled now. I've got really good friends, and my dogs, and my boyfriend...."

Adams trails off as a couple nearby begins to make out across their table. "That's so sexy. I'm sorry, but that's just so sweet," she says. "I'm so excited for my boyfriend to get here!" Le Gallo is due to arrive from L.A. the next day for the Christmas holidays, "and hopefully I can manipulate him into staying indefinitely," she says. "Manipulate? That sounds horrible! Convince. Seduce."

Adams says that "all of my friends and all of his family and my family love it in Enchanted when Giselle says to Patrick Dempsey's character about his relationship with his girlfriend, `You've been together five years and you haven't proposed? No wonder she's angry!' "

"I looked at Darren at the premiere and I was like..." She raises an eyebrow. "Let's just say he's not ready, and I'm not in a hurry, so that's our philosophy. I don't know if it's just from wearing so many costumes in my life, but I don't have any fantasies about a wedding day. It's not important to me." Adams enthuses about what is important to her: Le Gallo is fun, bright, cool, a "sincerely good guy," and not the jealous type. "He's been on location when I'm doing love scenes, and he never comes to set. He's not, like, looking around," she says. "He's very comfortable, and that's really admirable. We have trust. It's important. It's a rare and wonderful quality."

It's an especially handy characteristic when your girlfriend is regularly sharing on-screen embraces with the likes of Leo and McDreamy. "I've worked with some of the most charming, beautiful men," she sighs. "I never stopped being boy crazy. I was boy crazy in kindergarten. I was always aware of boys. And it's basically still the kindergarten girl: Oh, he's cute, oooooh!"

On the set of Miss Pettigrew, Adams was so distracted by her costar Lee Pace, outrageously sexy in his role as Adams' brooding lover, director Bharat Nalluri had to ask Pace to leave the set so Adams could concentrate. "Lee wasn't working that day, so he was just lounging. He's 6'4", so he's a lot of boy, and he was wearing cowboy boots," she says. "I was kind of staring at him, because he painted such a picture, and the director came over, and I was completely in this land of admiring Lee. And Bharat goes over and tells him, `Can you leave the set? Amy's distracted by your masculinity.' I was mortified. But he's so much fun, too. He's got such a zest for life. He's a really good actor. So that's my gush about Lee Pace. I hope I'm not blushing. My boyfriend will understand. He knows who his girlfriend is."

No doubt he understands that Adams is just someone who gets excited—about her costars, both male and female (about McDormand she says, with unblinking earnestness, "Frances is unbelievable as a human being"), about ideas (her eyes well up as she talks about the beauty of the seeking aspect that binds the characters in Doubt), and about, well, coffee. "I like coffee too much," she says. "Sometimes I go to bed at night, and I get excited that I'm gonna have coffee in the morning! Like I sit there and I think, I get to wake up and have coffee!"

Adams' enthusiasm for the world is infectious—it's what makes her so charismatic on-screen. When she smiles her toothy, gleeful grin, her joy surges in your own heart. When she weeps over her lost baby in Junebug, your own heart breaks. Heck, when she urges Will Ferrell's fallen NASCAR hero to get back in the driver's seat in Talladega Nights, you want to go out and drive 100 miles an hour yourself. "She's wonderful," director John Patrick Shanley says, "in both senses of the word. She's wonderful to watch but also full of wonder. She has an extremely demonstrative face, and when you look into her eyes, there's a wonder that's there and a receptivity to what's going on around her. She's a door into another world, and it's a sort of magical world."

On the Doubt set, Shanley says he "saw an actress in transition." In rehearsals with Hoffman and Streep, Adams has truly stepped into the big leagues. "It's like going to a master class for three weeks," she says. "I just often think, How amazing it is that I just get to be here and watch these guys work? But they are lovely and in no way intentionally intimidating. Any intimidation I felt was purely in my own head."

Shanley says he has particularly enjoyed watching Streep and Adams interact. "It's a very funny relationship, because it mirrors the relationship in the story," he says of Streep's Mother Superior and Adams' new initiate. "Meryl's the strict one, and Amy's trying to please, and Meryl is lecturing her and pushing her around, and Amy's trying to accept it with grace and humility but struggling with her own vivacity."

Next up for Adams is another project with Streep: Nora Ephron's adaptation of Julie & Julia, a Queens secretary's account of spending a year cooking every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking (Streep will play Child; Adams will play the secretary). She was drawn to the character's attempt to take her destiny into her own hands and find creative fulfillment. "She didn't have that, and she went after it. I really identified with that," says the girl who came to Los Angeles with nothing but some green clogs and an openness to adventure. "You can't be completely helpless. At some point you have to realize that it's your own choices that mold your life. Even if it's not going the way you want, you have to somehow take control of your destiny inside your heart and say, `This is my choice.' And if it's hard..." Adams pauses and smiles. "That's okay."

Adams came by her endearing frugality honestly, as one of seven kids in a working-class Midwestern family. Adams' father was in the army when she was born and now manages hospital equipment repair. Her mother, after gestating the last Adams heir, went on to become a semiprofessional bodybuilder, "if that tells you anything about her personality," Adams says with a laugh, and until recently worked at Starbucks. Adams was the middle child (it goes boy, girl, boy, Amy, girl, boy, boy) and spent most of her childhood in the smallish town of Castle Rock, Colorado, where she was raised Mormon (she's no longer practicing), studied ballet, hated school, and hung out with the theater crowd. Her parents divorced when she was 11, and her father remarried—and no, not to an Enchanted-style evil stepmother, she says, but "it's always a difficult transition. I will say that."

After graduation, when she realized she wasn't gifted enough to make it as a professional ballerina ("I'm too muscley, and I didn't have great turnout, you know?"), she started doing dinner theater, first in Boulder and then in Minnesota, where she was discovered by scouts casting for 1999's Drop Dead Gorgeous, the Kirstie Alley/Kirsten Dunst film about a murderous pageant mom, which was being filmed nearby. While Adams had dreamed, in an idle way, of going to New York to try to make it on Broadway, this was the first time she considered Hollywood as a viable career choice. "I just never associated myself with the people I saw on-screen," she says. "It's not that I didn't want to do it; it was just such a leap."

It was Alley who convinced her it was possible. "I was in a conversation with her, and she said, in her way, `You should go. You're young, you're funny, you'll probably get work.' It sounds so silly," Adams says, "but it was all I needed to hear." She flew home to Colorado and met up with her younger brother Eddie; they packed up his car and drove west together. On the way, Eddie's engine blew out, stranding them in Las Vegas, New Mexico, "the murder capital," their tow-truck driver told them.

"It was an adventure to us," she says. "We were just so excited to be breaking the mold and seeing what our futures held for us. It was an exciting time. Scary and thrilling." When they arrived in Los Angeles in a rented U-Haul, they had to look, on foot, for an apartment and work. They thought about starting a housecleaning service. "Which, if you know me, is absurd," she says. "I can't clean anything. I'm so untidy it's not even funny." Adams waited tables for two days before scoring a manager—still her manager to this day, the one who gave her the cashmere—who immediately began to send her out on auditions. "I still remember I was wearing the most awful shoes when I met her. They were lime green rubber wedge clogs," she says. "I thought they were pretty. I wore them for a good year before I realized they weren't."